Veil (Our Spirit is Too Quick and Hot)
by Kay Adshead
Over the course of a single day, four women in very different worlds confront the systems, traditions and relationships that have confined them — and discover that change can begin at the moment the structures around them start to break.
Four women, living in radically different circumstances, move through the same extraordinary day.
Aaliyah is a teenager in a displaced, once-nomadic community in sub-Saharan Africa, keeping vigil beside her dying Great-Grandmother Magda as a long-buried family secret emerges. Beatrice is a Singaporean quantitative analyst whose ordered life is governed by numbers, algorithms and the global markets. Chitra is a doctor working in a war-damaged hospital, caring for Syra, a fourteen-year-old girl whose pregnancy is the result of an act of extreme violence. Dee is an Essex mother whose immaculate black-and-white home conceals the increasingly restrictive behaviour of her husband.
Their stories unfold alongside one another in a series of intercut movements. Across a desert settlement, a glass financial tower, a hospital ward and a suburban house, familiar structures begin to shift. An old woman refuses the future others have planned for her. A doctor questions what silence requires of her. A world built on numbers falters. A woman begins to see the life around her differently.
By sunset, none of the four women is quite where she began.
Our Spirit is Too Quick and Hot is a play about women negotiating inherited rules, violence, control and expectation — and about what may become possible when those rules cease to appear inevitable.